Actions from Robert GarciaMovable Type Pro 4.382012-02-02T21:17:02Zhttp://www.kcet.org/user/profile/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=feed&_type=actions&username=rgtcpCommented on A Brief History of the Los Angeles Plaza, the City's Misplaced Heart in SoCal Focustag:www.kcet.org,2012:/updaily/socal_focus//1239.42201#359242012-02-03T05:17:02ZRobert Garcia
We appreciate what is included in this short history of the Plaza -- but it is too short and leaves out significant parts of the forgotten history of people of color in Los Angeles.

*Native Americans.* The Plaza and El Pueblo were built on the site of the Native American Tongva Gabrieleño village of Yaangna. The Native Americans were for the most part exterminated by succeeding onslaughts of Spaniards, Catholic missionaries, Mexicans, and Yankees. About 200 Tongvas lived in Yaangna, the largest of some 100 villages that were home to about 5,000 Native Americans in the Los Angeles region, when the Spaniards arrived in 1769. Eventually, the Tongvas were relocated to the east side of the River. In the mid-1800s, Yaangna was destroyed.

Today Yaangna is commemorated only by a small plaque at Union Station.

*Pobladores.* Los Pobladores who settled the original Pueblo and built the Plaza included 44 Spanish, Native American, Black, mestizo and mulatto settlers, and four Spanish soldiers.

*Desecration of Native Americans and Pobladores.* In 2010, during the construction of County Supervisor Gloria Molina’s pet museum project, the county illegally and secretly excavated 103 ancestors buried at the Campo Santo across the street from the Plaza, including Native Americans and Pobladores. The federal government has withheld federal funding for the project and is continuing its investigation. Molina has admitted “There’s probably gonna be plenty of blame to go around on all of it. For us, we probably didn’t have as thorough an EIR as we probably should have had.” “Had [the county’s contractor] done better work, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

*Black L.A.* A Black man, Francisco Reyes, served as alcalde (mayor) of El Pueblo in 1793, almost two hundred years before Tom Bradley, the first Black man elected mayor under statehood. The last Mexican governor of California before statehood, Pío Pico, was born of African, Native American, and European ancestry under a Spanish flag. Biddy Mason, one of the most prominent citizens of early Los Angeles, was born a slave in Mississippi. She walked behind her owner’s wagon first to Utah and then to Los Angeles. She gained her freedom in Los Angeles through a federal court order in 1856, just before the United States Supreme Court held in the Dred Scott case that slaves were chattel entitled to no constitutional protections because Blacks had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” With savings earned as a midwife, Biddy Mason bought a homestead a few blocks south of the Plaza on Spring Street between Third and Fourth. She helped found the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the most influential and affluent African American churches in the City today. The Biddy Mason wall and pocket park in the heart of downtown Los Angeles commemorate her contributions to the City.

Despite the prominent role of Blacks in early Los Angeles, Black residential and business patterns began to change in response to discriminatory housing and land use patterns in the twentieth century. Los Angeles pioneered the use of racially restrictive housing covenants. The California Supreme Court sanctioned restrictive covenants in 1919 and California courts continued to reaffirm them as late as 1947. The Federal Housing Authority not only sanctioned restrictions, but developed a recommended formula for their inclusion in subdivision contracts. Blacks increasingly were pushed out of the Plaza area and became concentrated a few miles away in South Central Los Angeles. 95% of the city’s housing stock was off limits to Blacks and Asians in the 1920s.

*Chinatown.* The article states “The infamous Calle de los Negros--given an unprintable English appellation--was home to several gambling dens and in 1871 was the site the vicious Chinese Massacre, in which a mob of 500 white men murdered 19 Chinese men and boys.” It is inappropriate to coyly white wash, literally, the history of discrimination at the site. Nigger Alley was the line that defined “the other side of the tracks” on the east side of El Pueblo. Old Chinatown was there, not just gambling dens. Old Chinatown was razed to build Union Station in the 1930s. Chinese who were forcibly evicted built the present New Chinatown.

*Japanese.* The first Japanese emigrant party to the mainland United States reached California in 1869. Japanese migration increased significantly in the 1880s, in part because of the demand for labor caused by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Since the 1910s, Los Angeles has been the home of more Japanese Americans than any other city in the United States. Little Tokyo, located just south of Old Chinatown, became the residential, business, and cultural center of the Japanese American community in Southern California. The Japanese were moved to concentration camps during WW II. Black folks from the south looking for defense jobs moved in and the area became known as Bronzeville.

*Culture and history.* David Alfaro Siqueiros, the great Mexican muralist, painted "America Tropical" depicting an indigenous person double crossed with the American Eagle hanging over his head in the 1930s on Italian Hall. The city whitewashed the mural immediately, ironically thereby preserving it for future generations.

The standard history of the Plaza is written by William Estrada, a Latino man.

Robert Garcia, Founding Director and Counsel, The City Project, and a contributor to KCET's Departures.